Have You Found Her (13 page)

I’m sorry,
I wanted to say, but he spoke first.

“I would just hate to find out that she’s…playing you, somehow.”

My mood flipped again. Was he fucking kidding me? Nobody could
play
me; I knew the game too well. Who was at the shelter week after week; who knew these girls from the inside and out?
Me.
And besides me, there was Jodi, Sam’s other biggest fan—with twenty years of experience under her belt; nobody was
playing
Jodi. I smirked at Bill’s civilian ignorance.

“How in the world could she be playing me? What’s she playing me for, a notebook? Some cookies? She hasn’t asked me for a single cent, and I haven’t offered her one.”
Not one cent, just a week in Disney World.
I barreled past the thought. “All I’m giving her is my time, and my caring. What’s she playing me for, hugs? She’s a homeless junkie, Bill, I’m just trying to do the right thing here, and I don’t understand why everybody is fighting me on this!”

“Nobody’s fighting you!” he said, exasperated.

“Then why are we fighting?” I yelled.

“I don’t know!”

He put his scotch down too hard on the table, put his head in his hand. This was making him miserable.
I
was making him miserable. I stubbed out the joint and moved over to sit next to him.

“I’m sorry, babe. I know I’ve been distracted a lot, and I have been spending a lot of time with Sam. And I know I’ve said this before, but she will be going to rehab soon. She should be ready to get out of the psych ward any day, and they’re going to send her straight upstate, and then things will settle down. I promise. But I can’t just abandon her, now that I’ve made the commitment. I just want her to get to rehab, that’s all I want.”

Bill nodded at his lap. “I know.”

“I mean, you’re right, I’m right back where I was over the holidays; I’m totally stressed out and overtaxed—”

He cut me short. “I know.”

I didn’t know what else to say. It scared me when Bill pulled away like this—that was supposed to be
my
prerogative. I put my arms around him, and he wrapped one arm around me.

“I love you,” I tried.

“I love you, too,” he said. It sounded more like,
I would pay you to shut up and leave me alone.

For the first time in three years, we went to bed unhappy.

Sam was two days away from going to rehab when she smashed the mirror in her room and was committed to the psych ward for another week.

I arrived at the ward at the start of visiting hours, bearing a Mountain Dew and a Kit Kat bar, excited to update our Disney countdown—only 367 days to go!—when I saw her in the hallway, stripped of her street clothes and clad only in a hospital gown and slippers. She looked bleached again, her expression ghostly. There was a series of fresh cuts on her newly healed hand.

“What happened?” I asked, swooping to her side. We sat right down in the lounge, and she began.

Well, everything had been really hard, she said. Even with the meds, she was still completely depressed. And the ward wasn’t helping her; it was making it worse.

“Which is why you have to get to rehab as soon as you can,” I interrupted. “This place isn’t doing you any good.”

“I know,” she said. “I just…the stuff we’ve been talking about the past couple days…”

What we’d been talking about: Sam blamed herself for the death of a friend, murdered in a drug deal. She blamed herself for turning a girl on to meth; within eight months, the girl was dead. She had a lot on her conscience, she told me, hinting that there were things I’d rather not know.

It’s like child soldiers in the Congo, I’d told her. They’re children. Nobody blames them for what they were forced to do to survive.

She’d told me more about her younger sister, Eileen, the one who’d tried to kill herself and failed, wound up comatose and then in a group home. Eileen had joined Sam on the streets for a few weeks two years ago; it hadn’t worked out, so she’d gone back to living with friends. Then she found out she was HIV-positive. Then she tried to kill herself.

“So all of this has just been on my mind, so much, you know? And I can’t stop thinking about it. About how shitty my life has been, and how I deserve it, and how nothing is ever going to change what happened, or who I am. I mean, even if I go to rehab, I’m still going to be the same person, with the same past—what’s rehab going to do for me? It’s just going to change the outside. Inside I’m still going to be a worthless piece of shit.”

So she looked at herself in the mirror, and she saw her reflection smirking back at her. “And it was like nothing had changed.” Sam shook her head, ground her fist into her palm. All the work she had done over the past few months, all the relationships she’d tried to build—she’d thought she’d made progress, but she still had that look on her face. Like she was damaged and proud of it, and it was never going to change.

“So I punched the mirror. I didn’t think it would break! I mean, what kind of psych ward is this? They shouldn’t have mirrors that break! That’s not my fault, and now they’re punishing me!”

I wasn’t going to be drawn into the no-fault conversation now. “So what happened after you broke the mirror?”

Nothing, she said. Nobody even came to investigate the sound. She sat there looking at a shard of mirror, wondering whether or not to cut her own throat, until finally one of the orderlies came in and saw the broken glass.

“See, that proves I’m not going to kill myself. I totally had the chance, and I didn’t take it!”

Now her chin was up, defiant; she looked almost pleased with herself. I narrowed my eyes. Sam knew exactly what she was doing. She knew what was going to happen if she punched that mirror; she was going to get to stay at St. Victor’s, where the creeps and molesters were at least the ones you knew, where the orderlies sneaked her cigarettes, where Janice was available every single day. Goddamn it, I’d been so blind, so completely counterproductive. Sam was afraid to move on to rehab, and I’d been enabling her to stay.

“So now what?” I said, to myself as much as to Sam.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. They said I have to stay another week or so before I can go upstate, which is bullshit. I want to get out of here.” Her usual complaint, delivered with the usual doe eyes.

They weren’t working on me today. “Then you shouldn’t have punched a mirror,” I exhaled through clenched teeth. “Didn’t you just get over an infected hand from punching a wall? And you almost died from that infection—do you want another one? Jesus, Sam, you could have been at rehab two months ago; I thought that’s what you wanted. Is that even what you want?”

Her face crumpled and she hung her head. “Please don’t be mad at me, Janice.” Her voice was small, almost a whisper. Tears slid from her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

I exhaled again and put my hand on her back, feeling a pang of guilt. It was unfair to berate her for being self-destructive, when that was all she’d ever known how to be. I was angry at myself, not her. “I’m not mad. I’m just worried about you.”

She nodded, head still hung, tears still sliding. “I know. I’m sorry. I want to go to rehab, I do. I’m gonna. It’s just been so hard.”

“I know. I know.” I rubbed her back with my flat palm. “It’s okay.”

“And…and I know it’s not fair to you, you’ve gotta come see me all the time, you shouldn’t have to deal with this shit, I wish you—”

I cut her off. “I
want
to come see you. We’ve established that. Remember? You tried to get rid of me, and it didn’t work. Don’t worry about me. I’m not mad; I’m still going to be here. I’m just worried about you.”

She nodded again, to herself. Shook with suppressed sobs, dripping tears. I continued to rub her back.

“I really do want to get better,” she said, small-voiced. “I just don’t know if it’ll ever happen.”

“I know.”

I moved my hand to her shoulder, pulled her toward me so her head was leaning almost on top of mine, her side pressed against me. We sat this way in silence for a minute or two.

If she didn’t get to rehab soon—if I’d helped to fuck this up for her—I’d be punching my reflection, too.

Absurdly, through all of this, I continued to have a life: working, hanging around with Bill and the cats, seeing my friends and my family.

“So how’s your little homeless girl doing?” they’d ask me.

Twenty minutes later: “…So for now, she’s still in the psych ward, waiting for rehab. But how are
you
?”

And I continued to volunteer, going directly from the psych ward after a quick session with Sam to the shelter, where I’d found my little butch friend, Mel, in the cafeteria having a hushed discussion with four other girls—Lola the suicidal pregnant girl, Lola’s girlfriend Vivian, and two girls I didn’t recognize.

“They say we’re all getting discharged, all of us who went to PA.”

They’d allowed me to sit at their table, so I took the liberty of joining the conversation. “Who’s getting discharged?”

“All of us,” moaned Mel. “That’s what Andreas told me. He said since we were gone for three days, they shouldn’t have even taken us back, and he was going to get us discharged.”

Andreas was a counselor on the boys’ floor, rumored to be a real hard-ass prick. Sam told me she thought he was on drugs, probably coke and pills—
You can kind of smell it on him,
she said, and if anyone had a nose for drugs, it was Sam. “Andreas can’t discharge you,” I said. “He’s not on your floor. And why would he want to, anyway?”

“Because we were gone. But it wasn’t our fault!”

Oh, of course not. “What happened?”

“We ran away to join a Jesus cult,” said Lola, waving it off like this happened all the time. “Like, eight of us was hanging out and these people was talking to us about their place in Pennsylvania, and they made it sound really good, so we went with them, and then all of a sudden we’re in this van, and we’re praying at three in the morning—”

“Yeah,” Mel interjected. “We were there on this cult farm for a few days, and then the cops came, and it turns out the cops were watching the cult people, and the FBI and everything, so I don’t know what happened after that, but they brought us back here. But now they say they’re gonna discharge us early.”

What the fuck?
I had to hear more about this one. “Wait, wait, wait, you’re going to have to slow down.” But they couldn’t, they were too busy trying to figure out the ramifications for themselves.

“Well, they can’t discharge me, I’m MHP. I’m
supposed
to do crazy shit.” Lola made a
nyah nyah
face. MHP stood for mental health program; it was a special designation within the shelter for girls who were planning to get public assistance for being crazy. Lola’s nickname at the shelter was “Lola Lola Bipola.”

I let Mel and Lola and Vivian hash it out and went to see if I could catch Jodi before she took off for the night. She was just locking the door of her office behind her as I approached.

“How you doin’?” She gave me her arch smile. “How’s our little friend today?”

I smiled in reply. “Well, she’s not great—of course you heard she punched her mirror?”

Jodi rolled her eyes. “Oh, I heard. I’m in touch with the hospital every day about that kid, and she’s not even officially a resident anymore. You know she blew her spot in rehab again with this mirror thing—now this place is saying they won’t take her, and I gotta find her
another
program. She’s gonna be the death of me.”

I shuddered from the chill that hit me—no, Sam hadn’t mentioned that she’d blown her spot in rehab. I thought she was leaving as soon as she was discharged from the psych ward. Now there’d be another delay, another string of days or weeks I’d be spending by her side, soaking up the aftereffects of her miserable childhood. “The rehab won’t take her?”

“Nope. They’re just a rehab; they can’t take you if you’re mentally ill. A little suicidal ideation, okay, but now they’re balking at the mirror thing, saying maybe she’s really a threat to herself or others. So I have to find her a place that takes MICA patients—mentally ill, chemically addicted. But I think we got a thirty-day program that might have room sometime this month. We’ll see.”

“Oh, wow.” I slumped, resting my butt on the arm of the green chair outside her office. “I didn’t know that. I thought she was still going to rehab in a week.”

Jodi looked sympathetic. “Well, she may be, but only for a month. And then, I don’t know. Maybe we can get the place upstate to take her, if she stays stable and doesn’t pull any more stunts.”

“Oh, wow.”

“I know. She’s a lot to deal with.” She cocked her head and one eyebrow. “I talk to her every day. She tells me you come visit her all the time.”

“Well, I’ve been…” I flushed and tried to cover, but I couldn’t. It was true, and so what if it was? “Yeah,” I admitted.

The eyebrow got higher. “She told me about Disney World.”

Damn you, Sam.
The Disney World deal was not supposed to be something that everybody knew about. It kind of didn’t sound so good, when Jodi said it out loud. It kind of sounded like I was a child molester. I braced myself for it—
I think you should cool it with Sam.
“Okay,” I said.

Jodi held my eyes. “And I think it’s a good thing that you’re doing for her. You’ve been very dedicated, and that means a lot to a kid like her. You know, she’s going to need a lot of help if she’s ever going to lead any kind of normal life, and if you feel like you can provide some of that to her, I think she’s very lucky.” She reached out and patted my arm—
Good girl
. “Listen, I gotta get out of here. My own kid is probably starving. Good to see you, though. I’ll let you know what’s happening, when I know.”

She walked away, and I composed myself on the arm of her waiting chair. Good news, bad news. The good news was, Jodi approved of me. She told me I could take Sam to Disney World. She didn’t tell me to hand over my volunteer ID and get the hell out of the building before she called the cops. The bad news was, Sam might not make it to rehab before I lost my mind completely.